Graduate Students

Greyson Abid
(B.A., Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2014) Greyson is primarily interested in philosophy of mind and foundational issues in cognitive science.

Randall Amano
(A.B.,
Harvard University) He is writing a dissertation on the role of
normativity in Kant’s account of our cognitive capacities. His
advisors are Hannah Ginsborg, Daniel Warren, and Janet Broughton. He has interests in many areas of philosophy including the history of modern philosophy, epistemology, self-knowledge, normativity, and
perception.

Michael Arsenault
(B.A. Hons. with high distinction, University of Toronto, 2011) I’m interested in contemporary philosophy of mind, especially perception; Aristotle, and Wittgenstein.

Mathias Boehm
(M.A. Philosophy, HU Berlin) For the most part, I like to think about philosophy of language but I also like to think about topics in metaphysics and I would like to think more about non classical logics and epistemology.

Adam Bradley
(B.A., Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, 2011) Adam is a 7th year student who works in the philosophy of mind and related areas. At the moment, he is writing a dissertation on pain and bodily awareness.

Scott Casleton
(B.A., with distinction, Yale University). Scott has broad interests in the history of philosophy, with particular attention to differences in philosophical method across time and place. His less ambitious goals are to work in philosophy of art, language, and law; his more ambitious goals include combating any form of metaphysics.

Monika Chao
(B.A., philosophy, University of North Carolina, Asheville, M.A., philosophy, San Francisco State University) Monika is mainly interested in philosophy of language and its intersections with philosophy of science and metaphysics. She also has interests in feminist philosophy as well as aesthetics (i.e. watching basketball).

Sophia Dandelet
(B.A., UC Berkeley, 2013). Her main interests are in metaethics and philosophy of language. In particular, she’s been thinking about ethical disagreement; the relationship between normative judgments and motivation; and whether rational explanations of behavior are compatible with certain kinds of causal explanations.

Caitlin Dolan
(B.A., summa cum laude, NYU, 2009) Caitlin works primarily on the philosophy perception, mostly by asking questions about its epistemology and its aesthetic nature. She is interested in contemporary debates on these topics, as well as their roots in the early Modern and early analytic traditions. Her dissertation explores the sense in which depiction is a distinctively visual form of representation.

Omar Fakhri
(B.A., Biola University) His main interests are in epistemology, metaethics, and ethics. He also has secondary interests in metaphysics, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of science.

Nick French
(B.A., summa cum laude with High Honors in Philosophy, NYU 2012). Nick is primarily interested in ethics. He is currently writing a dissertation on our moral obligations to other people and the moral significance of the reasons for which people act. He hopes that his dissertation will deepen our understanding of contractualist accounts of morality.

Nicholas Gooding
(B.A., Philosophy, McGill University, 2009). Nick has interests that range across the history of philosophy, both ancient and modern, primarily in the history of ethics, political philosophy and legal theory.

Tyler Haddow
(B.A., Philosophy, Stanford University, 2014) Tyler is interested in what a good life is and what it takes to live one.Here are some more specific and hopefully more tractable topics he has been thinking about recently: moral luck, integrity, trust, social practices/rituals, habits, attention, moods, practical necessity (“I must!”), and expertise. Or maybe it’s best just to list philosophers: Williams, Baier, Wittgenstein, Hume, Confucius, Murdoch, Nietzsche, Heidegger. Currently (Fall ‘17), Tyler is the GSI for Prof. Sluga’s Nietzsche course. His office hours are on Mondays from 2-3:30.Tyler’s current and former students should always feel welcome to email him for course or reading suggestions!

Blake Harper
(B.A., summa cum laude with highest honors in Philosophy and Religious Studies, Middlebury College, 2015). Blake’s primary interests are in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. His secondary interests include data ethics and philosophy of biology. Blake also has a fondness for transcendental arguments in epistemology.

Jessica Heppler
(B.A., summa cum laude, SUNY Geneseo) Jes is currently interested in epistemology, moral psychology, and political philosophy. She has most recently been thinking about concepts, intuitions, and emotions.

James Hutchinson
(B.A., University of Toronto, 2009) Jim works mostly on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language, especially as they appear in the modern and early analytic periods.His dissertation, Frege’s Systematic Conception of Truth and its Consequences, is about Gottlob Frege’s view that whatever is true must fit into a systematic science, and the way this leads him to think about logic and language. More information available at his website: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jimehutchinson/

Ethan Jerzak
(A.B., University of Chicago, 2010). Mainly philosophy of language and logic. Also epistemology and metaethics.

Jeffrey Kaplan
(B.A., summa cum laude, Williams College, 2009; M.Phil., University of Cambridge, 2011)
Jeff’s research focuses on human-created normative practices, like law and language. He argues that these practices are normative in a non-moral sense and that this rules out some, but not all, reductive theories of law and language.

Jackson Kernion
(A.B., cum laude, Philosophy, Harvard, 2012) Jackson is primarily interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of science. He’s currently writing a dissertation on the concept of conscious experience, arguing for a certain kind of a priori functional constraint on experience. When not philosophizing, he likes to go hiking and keep up a coding hobby.

Alex Kerr
(B.A. with highest honors, Oberlin College, 2010) Alex is working on a dissertation about spatial experience: our experience of spatial features and relations, like size, shape, distance, and orientation.

Erica Klempner
(B.A., Oxford
University; S.M., MIT) Erica is currently interested in everything.
Eventually, she will have received an education, and will therefore
only be interested in one or two things.

Alex Kocurek
(B.Sc., Physics and Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, 2012) Alex (or “Arc”) mainly works in philosophical logic (in particular modal logic). His research interests intersect with philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.

Elek Lane
(B.A., University of Chicago) So far, I have mostly pondered meaning, skepticism, and thought. But this is only a rough approximation of my interests, which stubbornly range over all areas of philosophy.

Urte Laukaityte
(B.A. Linguistics, University of Cambridge; M.Sc. Philosophy of Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh) Urte is most readily excitable about issues in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, psychology and philosophy of science. Her more niche interest is psychiatry.

Madeleine Levac
(B.A. Hons. with high distinction, University of Toronto). Madeleine has a number of disparate philosophical interests; her present intention, however, is to focus on philosophy of language and Kant.

Jennifer Marsh
(B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 2011) Jennifer is mainly interested in epistemology and philosophy of mind. She is also interested in the history of modern philosophy, particularly the epistemologies of Hegel and Kant.

Dustin Neuman
(B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.A., Brandeis University). His main interests are in philosophy of language and philosophy of logic. He also has a strong interest in contemporary metaphysics.

Adam Paris
(B.A., New York University). Adam is primarily interested in epistemology and the history of philosophy (early modern and German Idealism). He is currently working on external world skepticism and topics in Kant.

Kirsten Pickering
(B.A., Arizona State University, 2009) Kirsten is writing a dissertation on the objectivity of ethics and its implications for ethical justification and knowledge. She also has interests in the history of ethics and meta-ethics, moral psychology, and political and legal philosophy.

Emily Podhorcer
(B.A., Rutgers University). Emily is primarily interested in epistemology, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. Recently she has been thinking about the philosophy of humor.